Measuring and managing the design restriction of enterprise architecture (EA) principles on EA models

Implementation and formalisation, alongside with creation, adoption and usage of Enterprise Architecture (EA) principles are hot topics of the current years of EA research. However, the EA community, both academic and professional, misses a consensus on the definitions and use of principles. Furthermore, not much research is done in the direction of measuring the impact (e.g. design restriction) of EA principles. We aim to create a formal framework for measuring and managing this impact manifested by the EA principles on the EA models. Studying the current literature, we noticed there are similarities and differences between EA principles and regulations. The two concepts resemble each other given first, the purpose (both providing a normative guidance on the evolution of the enterprise) and second, the natural language representation and the structural definition (even if most of the time the principles are company specific, they all seem to have common fields in their definition). Principles behave mostly like soft-laws and being non-compliant with them results in fewer penalties and consequences compared to non-compliance with regulations. To that end, we investigate and adapt methods similar to the ones that can be found in requirements engineering for checking and managing regulatory compliance.